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t"2.5 2iJii^
THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Tercentenary of 'Don Quixote'
Cervantes in England
By James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
[Frojn the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol II]
London
Published for the British Academy
By Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press Warehouse
Amen Corner, E.C.
Price One Shilling net
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND
By JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY
COEEESPONDING MEMBER OF THE EOYAL SPANISH ACADEMY
Read January S5, 1905
In Commemoration of the Tercentenary of 'Don Quixote'
Lord Re ay. Your Excellencies, and Gentlemen : —
My first duty is to express to the Council and to the members
of the British Academy my thanks for the distinguished honour
which they have done me in inviting me to address them on this
occasion of high international interest; and my second duty is to
deliver to you. Lord Beay, a message from your learned brethren
who form the Royal Academy of Spain, As a member of that
ancient and illustrious body, desirous of associating itself with your
proceedings to-day, it falls to me to act as its spokesman, and to con-
vey to you its fraternal greetings as well as its grateful recognition
of the prompt enthusiasm which has impelled you to take the lead in
honouring the most famous literary genius that Spain can boast.
You have met together here to do homage to one of the great men
of the world, and to commemorate the publication of the book with
which he endowed mankind just three hundred years ago. It is
in strict accordance with historic tradition that you, as the official
representatives of British culture, should be the first learned body in
Europe to celebrate this tercentenary, and I propose to show that,
since the first decade of the seventeenth century, this country has
been foremost in paying tribute to an amazing masterpiece. The
work has survived, no doubt, by virtue of its intrinsic and trans-
cendent merits ; but, like every other creation, it has had to struggle
for existence, and it is gratifying to us to remember that British
insight, British appreciation, British scholarship, and British muni-
ficence have contributed towards the speedier recognition of
Cervantes's genius. I will ask your permission, my Lord, to
demonstrate this restricted thesis instead of taking you and your
colleagues through the labyrinth of sesthetic criticism for which
the subtle ingenuity of three centuries is responsible. But it may
Ql
2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
not be out of place to begin with a few words concerning the author
of Don Quixote and the circumstances in which his romance was
produced.
Many alleged incidents in his picturesque career have afforded
subjects to poets and dramatists and painters ; but these are exercises
in the domain of imagination, and the briefest summary of ascertained
facts will be more to my purpose. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
was bom at AlcaU de Henares in 1647. The son of a humble
apothecary-surgeon, without a university degree, and constantly
wandering from town to town in search of patients, Cervantes cannot
well have received a systematic education; but we really know
nothing of his youth except that, at some date previous to 1569, he
composed copies of mediocre verses dedicated to Philip the Second's
wife, Isabel de Valois. He is next heard of as chamberlain to the
future Cardinal Acquaviva at Rome ; thence he passed into the army,
fought under Don John of Austria at Lepanto (where he received
the wound in his left hand which was to be a source of greater pride
to him than any of his writings), shared in the Navarino and Tunis
campaigns, and, after five years of service, set sail for Spain to seek
promotion. He was captured by Moorish pirates on September 26,
1575, and was carried into Algiers, where his heroic conduct won
him — not only the admiration of his fellow prisoners, but — ^the
respect of his taskmasters. After nearly five years of slavery in
Algiers, during which period he wrote verses (some of which have
been preserved), he was ransomed on September 19, 1580, returned to
Spain, was apparently employed in Portugal, married at the end
of 1584, and in the following year published the First Part of an
artificial and ambitious pastoral romance. La Galatea. At this time
he was writing numerous plays which, so he tells us, won popular
favour; evidently they were not so successful as their author
imagined in his retrospect, for in 1587 Cervantes sought and found
less congenial occupation in collecting provisions for the Invincible
Armada. It was ill-paid work, but it gave him bread, while
literature and the drama did not. This is his first association
with England, and it was no fault of his if the equipment of the
Armada was not complete, for he perquisitioned with such tem-
pestuous zeal as to incur a threat of excommunication from the
ecclesiastics whose stores he seized. He remained in the public
service as collector of revenues, not greatly to his own satisfaction
(to judge by his application for one of four posts vacant in America),
and not altogether to the satisfaction of his official superiors (to judge
from the fact that he was imprisoned at Seville in 1597 for irregu-
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 3
larities in his accounts). He was soon releasetj, but apparently was
not reinstated. We cannot wonder at this : he h£l4 not the talent
for routine.
The next six or seven years must have been the dreariest period of
Cervantes's life. He lingered on in Seville, to all seeming ruined
beyond hope. But he was not embittered : ex forti dukedo. The
alchemy of his genius was now free to work, free to transmute
his personal misfortunes into ore more precious than that which f
the Spanish argosies brought from the mines of Potosi. In the |
Triana and other poor quarters of Seville, he heid daily oppor- 1
tunities of studying the originals of Gines de Pasamonte and of |
Binconete and Cortadillo, two diverting picaroons who perhaps came |
into existence before Sancho Panza; and in Seville, from 1597 to
1603, he had time to compare the dreams of life with its realities.
All unconsciously he had undergone an admirable preparation for
the task which lay before him. The vicissitudes of his troubled
existence constituted an inexhaustible intellectual capital. To any
ordinary eye they might seem a collection of unmanageable dross, r> ,
but the man of genius wields a divining-rod which leads him through ''-^{
the dusk to the spot where the hidden treasure lies; and so it ■..'>
happened with Cervaijtes. In the course of his long rides, collecting .^
the King's taxes, he had observed the personages whom he has "i
presented so vividly as to make them real to each of us three -
hundred years afterwards. It is the paramount faculty of imaginative '
creation to force us to see through the medium of its transfiguring o-
vision, and we have the privilege of knowing Spain in -Cervantes's
transcription of it. We accompany him in those journeys across
baking plains and sterile mountains and we meet the characters with ";
whom he was familiar. We cannot doubt that he had encountered
innkeepers who could cap a quotation from an ancient ballad, and who ,^
delighted in the incredible adventures of Cirongilio of Thrace or of ts
Felixmarte of Hircania ; demure Toledan silk-mercers on the road to 4*'
Murcia, with their sunshades up to protect them against the heat ; "i
barbers who preferred Galaor to his more famous brobher Amadis of j^
Gaul, and who were pleased to have Ariosto on their shelves even cT
though they could not read him ; Benedictine monks peering through ^-
their travelling spectacles from the backs of mules as tall as drome-
daries; canons far better acquainted with the romances of chivalry
than with Villalpando's treatise on logic ; amorous and noble youths
from Aragdn, disguised as muleteers; and perhaps a poor old-
fashioned gentleman who in some solitary hamlet pored and pored
over tales of chivalrous deeds till he persuaded himself that he
4. PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
was born to tepeat these exploits and to restofe the golden age
^that happy time when maleficent giants were neatly divided at
the waist by knights whose hearts were pure, and who themselves
avoided similar inconveniences by timely recoursis to Fierabras's
inestimable balsam, two drops of which joined to a nicety the
severed halves of a bisected paladin.
The time was coming when these casual acquaintances, embellished
by the sunniest humour and most inrbane irony, were to find place in
Cervantes's rich portrait-gallery and were to be his glory as well as
our delight. While he was giving artistic form to his reminiscences
as chamberlain, soldier, slave, poet, romancer, dramatist, tax-gatherer,
and broken wanderer, his knowledge of life was continually extending.
The Treasury was constantly upon his track. What actually took
place is somewhat obscure : Cervantes was (probably) imprisoned once
more in 1598 and (almost certainly) again in 1601-2. It may have
been in Seville jail that he began to write what he describes as a story
' full of thoughts of all sorts aud such as never came into any other
imagination — ^just what might be begotten in a prison, where every
misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling.' What
is certain is that early in 1603 he was ordered to appear before the
Exchequer Court there to produce his vouchers and explain his
confused accounts. It was the most fortunate thing that could have
happened to him. We may be tolerably sure tiiat the loose book-
keeping which had perplexed the Treasury clerks for years was not
made clear in an instant, and that Cervantes's examination was pro-
longed over a considerable period ; and it seems likely that, on one of
his journeys to and fro between Seville and Valladolid, he disposed
of a manuscript which had passed through many hands before it
found a publisher. This was the manuscript of Don Quixote.
The internal evidence of the book shows that Cervantes began
hesitatingly and tentatively, intending to write a comparatively
short story about a simple-hearted country-gentleman, mooning his
yeare away in some secluded hamlet till his craze for chivalrous
adventures led him into absurd situations which invited description
in a spirit of broad farce. The opening words of the sixth chapter
_\^ — El qual dormia — are awkwardly carried on from the fifth chapter,
^ and they go to show that no division of material was originally
contemplated. Moreover, we may say with some confidence that
the existence of the accomplished Sancho Panza is the result of
an afterthought; the idea probably occurred to Cervantes just
after penning the innkeeper's statement that knights were commonly
attended by squires. And it is curious to remark that the author
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND^ 5
fails at first to visualize tHe figure of Sancho Panza; he falters
in the attempt to draw the short, ventripotent rustic, and as late
as the ninth chapter describes him as tall and long-shanked.
A long-shanked Sancho ! One would have said that such a being
was inconceivable had not his creator first seen him in that strange
form.
The writer's prima ry_aim.„was_ta. ,paJody_aL.jcIags_of literature
which, though.,.na. longer so much appreciated at jcourt as^Jn^the
days of Juan jk VaJdra, or at ji^^ to
call Cafilornia after the griffin-haunted island in Las Sergas de
Esplandian, still had its admirers in the provinces ; and the_garQdy
is wholly admirable. But a mere parodist, as such, courts and
even condemns himself to oblivion, and, almost necessarily, the
more complete his success, the sooner he is forgotten by all save
students : the3edss-jdiich_j3£_iadku^^
dies with them. The very fact that Don Quixote survives is proof
that It outgrew the author's intention. Cervantes himself informs
us that his book is, 'from beginning to end, an attack upon the
romances of chivalry,' and we have no reason to justify us in rejecting
this statement. Still we must interpret it in relation to other
matters. Cer vantes can never hav e meant to dpstj^y, sf;t,.fj[ct;llfipt
an_exarnpl,e of-tJie fftudql prasg ^piff ns jijOSr^^^drjGmdai a long
romance which he must have known almost by heart : for in the
twentieth chapter he draws attention to the minute circumstance that
the taciturn Gasabel, the squire of Galaor, ' is only named once in the
whole of that history, as long as it is truthful.' And no man charges
his memory with precise details of what he considers a mass of
grotesque extravagances, of egotistical folly, and vapouring rant.
The extravagances, the folly, and the rant which disfigure the
works of such writers as Feliciano de Silva are destroyed for ever.
What was sound and wholesome in the tales of chivalry is preserved
in Don Quixote : preserved, illuminated, and ennobled by a puissant
imagination playing upon a marvellously rich experience.
The Manchegan madman has his delusions, but he is deluded A
on one point only : in all other respects he touches the realities J utdi-t (y/
of life and he remains a perpetual model of conduct, dignified in (. c/ * Q
disaster, magnanimous in victory, keen in perception, subtle in I
argument, wise in counsel. With him goes, as a foil to heroism, \
Sancho Panza, that embodiment of calculating cowardice, malicious i
humour, and prosaic common sense. This association of the man
abounding in ideas with the slower-witted, vulgar, practical person,
vaguely recalls the partnership of Peisthetairos and Euelpides ; and
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Aristophanes himself has no happier touch than that which exhibits
Sancho Panza, aware that his mastef is too mad to be depended
on in any other matter, but yet convinced that he may certainly
be trusted to provide the unnamed nebulous island which the
shrewd, droll villager feels a statesmanlike vocation to govern.
Can we wonder that the appearance of this enchanting pair was
hailed with delight when the history of their sallies was published
at Madrid early in 1605 ? We know that it was 'the book of the
year,' that within some six months there were pirated editions in
Portugal, a second edition in Madrid, a provincial edition at Valencia,
and that by June people ih Valladolid spoke of the adventurous knight
and his squire as though both were proverbial characters. Other
contemporary novels— 'Guzm&n de Alfarache, for instances-may
have had a larger circulation ; but the picaroon GuzmAn was (by
comparison) merely the comet of a season, while the renown of the
Ingenious Gentleman is more universal to-day than it has ever been.
His fame soon spread beyond the Pyrenees, and in 1607 a Brussels
publisher reprinted the original to meet the demands of the Spaniards
in the Low Countries. The book was thus brought within reach
of readers in the north of Europe, and they lost no time in profiting
by their opportunity. There are signs of Dmi Quixote in France
as early as 1608, but we may neglect them to-day, more especially
as there are still earlier traces of the book in this country.
We read of Richard Coeur-de-Lion helping to defend Santarem
agaitist the Moors, of the Black Prince's battles in Spain, of two
or three thousand English pilgrims yearly visiting the shrine of
Santiago de Compostela. But the literary connexion between
the Peninsula and England was slight. Early in the fifteenth
century Clemente Sdnchez de Vercial translated Odo of Cheriton's
Narraiiones under the title of El libra de los gatos ; the Speculum
Laicorum, an adaptation of Odo of Cheriton's work commonly ascribed
to John Hoveden, was translated into Spanish at about the same
period; then too GoWer's Confessio Amantis was translated into
Portuguese by Robert Payne, Canon of Lisbon, and, later, into Spanish
by Juan de Cuenca ; and the distinguished poet Francisco Imperial
introduces English words into his verses. These few examples
imply no great acquaintance with English literature, and we
may say that there was practically no knowledge of Spanish
literature in Fngland till the beginning of the sixteenth century,
when, in the year following the publication of Jmadfs de Gauh,
Henry the Eighth married Catharine of Aragdn. Spanish scholars
visited Lblidon Mid Oxford, and though, its iii the eftsfe of
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 7
Vives, they may have censured some of the most popular Spanish
books of the time, intercourse with them must naturally have
awakened interest in the literature of their country. The results
were seen in Lord Berners's renderings of works by Fernandez de San
Pedro and Guevara, and Guevara found other translators in the
persons of Bryan, North, Fenton, and Hellowes. Santillana was done
into English by Bamabe Googe, who had already given versions
of poems by Montemor, Boscdn, and Garcilaso de la Vega ; Abraham
Fraunce quoted the two latter poets in The Arcadian Rhetorike,
Sidney versified songs by Montemor, and there are translations of
such devout writers as Luis de Granada. With histories, technical
works and the like, I am not concerned here. It is more to our
purpose to note that Amadis de Gaula was translated by Anthony
Munday in 1589-95, and that it pleased readers to identify Gaula
with Wales and to discover in the romance places so familiar to them
as London, Windsor, and Bristol. Part of an earlier version by
Lord Lennox exists in manuscript.
The ground was thus prepared for Cervantes, and the new parody
of knight-errantry was certain to charm those who regretted that
Chaucer's tale of Sir Thopas had been so brusquely interrupted.
In the very year that the Brussels edition made Don Quixote
more easily available a translation of the book was begun by
Thomas Shelton, finished in forty days, and then laid aside for four
or five years ; and that there were other more or less attentive readers
of Don Quixote is shown by many passages in contemporary authors —
passages which have been collected by investigators like Emil
Koeppel. George Wilkins, though possibly responsible for the
rough sketches elaborated by a far greater artist into Timon of
Athens and Pericles, is not precisely a writer of impressive indepen-
dence and originality : rather, indeed, is he one whose eyes are con-
stantly on the weathercock, watching the direction of the popular
breeze. It is therefore all the more significant that in the third act
of The Miseries of Inforst Marriage, a play ^ven in 1607, Wilkins
should make the tipsy braggart William Scarborow say : —
Boy, bear tlie torch fair : now am I armed to fight with a windmill, and to
take the wall of an emperor.
' To fight with a windmill ! ' The expression betrays its source ;
it would be unmeaning to any one unacquainted with the eighth
chapter in which Cervantes describes Don Quixote's terrible adven-
ture with the giants whom the wizard Friston had transformed into
windmills upon the plain leading to Puerto Lapice. Wilkins was
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
not the man to write above the heads of his audiences, and he clearly
believed that they would catch the point of the allusion. The
experiment was evidently successful, for, in the following year,
Middleton repeated it in the fourth act of Your Fair Gallants,
presenting Pyamont exasperated at the loss of his forty pounds
and furiously declaring: —
I could fight with a windmill now.
A year or two passes and (probably about 1610) Ben Jonson in the
fourth act of 7%e Epicene causes Truewit to address Sir Dauphine
Eugenie in these terms : —
You must leave to live in ];our chamber, then, a month together upon
Amadis de Gaul, or Don Quixote, as ^ou are wont.
Manifestly the knight's reputation was made, for within three years
he took rank as the equal of his great predecessor, Amadis de Gaula,
whose penance on the Pena Pobre (a locality which has been identified
with the island of Jersey) he had imitated with such gusto on
the Sierra Morena. That the reference was seized by the public
is plain from its repetition next year by the same dramatist in the
fourth act of The Alchemist, where Kastril vilifies Drugger as
a pimp and a trig.
And an Amadis de Gaul, or a Don Quixote.
To about this date (1611) is assigned the composition of Fletcher's
Coxcomb and Nathaniel Field's Amends for Ladies, which are both
based upon the story of the Curious Impertinent interpolated in
Chapters XXXIII-XXXV of Don Quixote. You may perhaps re-
member that Lothario compares Anselmo's wife, Camila, to ' a diamond
of the first water, whose excellence and purity had satisfied all the
lapidaries that had seen it.' Field preserves the simile in one of the
speeches allotted to Sir John Love-all : —
To the unskilful owner's eyes alike
The Bristow sparkles as the diamond.
But by a lapidary the truth is found.
This same episode of the Curious Impertinent, which Lessing and
other critics have found tedious, furnished the theme of The Second
Maid's Tragedy, a play variously ascribed to Goughe, to Chapman,
to Shakespeare, and — with more probability — to Massinger and
Tourneur : and here again the simile of the virtuous woman and the
diamond is reproduced. Shelton's translation was printed in 1612,
and was speedily followed by a very frank adaptation of Don Quixote
in 7%e Knight of the Burning Pestle. Fletcher makes no attempt to
disguise the source of his piece: but it is amusing to observe his
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 9
anxiety to assure his public that he knows Spanish too well to need
Shelton's rendering, and that in fact his play had been completed
a year before the prose version was published. In 1613 Robert
Anton closes his Moriomachia with a reference to 'Mambrinoes
inchaunted helmet ' ; and both the knight and the squire are men-
tioned later in Drayton's Nimphidia.
This record is not meagre ; but, since the ascription to Shake-
speare of The Second Maid's Tragedy is no longer maintained by
any competent scholar, one mighty name is missing from the bede-
roU. Did Shakespeare know Don Quixote? The question is con-
stantly asked, and the usual answer is that he could not have
read the book because he knew no Spanish. I am reminded
of the advice given to a newly appointed judge whose knowledge
of law was rusty : — ' Give your decision and it may be right ; never
give your reasons, for they are sure to be wrong.' I do not dwell on
the passage in Much Ado About Nothing which recalls LazariUo de
Tormes, nor on the points of resemblance between Montemor's Diana
and the Two Gentlemen of Verona : they do not necessarily imply
a knowledge of Spanish. But it is certain that Shakespeare might
easily have known Don Quixote without knowing Spanish, for Shelton's
version was in print four years before Shakespeare died. Apart
from this, however, the longer one lives the more chary one becomes
of committing oneself to absolute statements as to what Shakespeare
did, or did not, know. He may not have been an expert in Spanish :
probably he was not. But he seems to have known enough to
read a collection of dull stories published at Pampluna in 1609,
and at Antwerp in 1610. This volume, never translated (so far as is
known) into any other language, is the JVbcAe* delnviemo of Antonio
de Eslava, and the title of A Winter's Tale is obviously taken from
the title of the Spanish book. This, if it stood alone, might be
explained away as an instance of unconscious reminiscence. How-
ever, as we have lately learned — from Dr. Gamett, amongst others —
Shakespeare's debt to Spain goes much beyond the mere borrowing
of a title : for, from the fourth chapter of the Primera Noche de
Invierno comes the plot of The Tempest, Prospero of Milan and his
daughter Miranda being substituted for Dardano of Bulgaria and
his daughter Serafina, All things considered, perhaps we should not
dismiss too cavalierly a belated entry in the register of the Stationers'
Company : ' TTie History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher and Shake-
speare, 20«.' The lateness of the date (1653) deprives this entry
of authority, and, as the play has vanished, it is impossible to discuss
the question of its attribution ; but we may plausibly conjecture that
Q 3
10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Shakespeare, or some younger contemporary, found material for yet
another drama in the story told to Don Quixote by the tattered,
distraught Andalusian gentleman whom he met wandering near the
Venta de Cdrdenas on the northern slope of the Sierra Morena.
Meanwhile, though the presses of Spain, Italy, and the Low
Countries continued to issue reprints of the original in 1608, 1610,
and 1611 respectively, the author was in no haste to publish the
continuation mentioned at the end of the First Part. There we are
told that an academician of Argamasilla had succeeded in deciphering
certain parchments containing Castilian verses, ' and that he means to
publish them in hopes of Don Quixote's third sally.' The promise
is vague, and, such as it is, the pious aspiration is perhaps neutralized
by a final ambiguous verse from the Orlcmdo fwriaso : —
Forse altri cantera con miglior plettro.
These concluding sentences have given rise to so much controversy
that I shall be justified in dwelling upon them for a moment. If we
consider the text and the quotation from Ariosto together, the
passage may be taken to mean that any one who chose was welcome
to continue the story, or it may be construed as an announcement of
Cervantes's intention to publish a sequel himself. Now, in view
of what happened afterwards, the significance of these phrases may
seem obvious; but we are not entitled to interpret them solely in
the light of subsequent events. The questions for us to answer are
two : what did Cervantes intend to convey when he wrote the passage ?
and what interpretation might his contemporaries fairly put upon it ?
If he meant that any other writer was free to publish a continuation
of Don Quixote, he had no cause for complaint when he was taken
at his word. If he meant that he himself would issue the sequel,
it is unfortunate that he did not say so with his customary plainness,
and strange that he delayed so long in following up his triumph.
It was not till 1613, more than eight years after the appearance
of the First Part, that he publicly announced the sequel as forth-
coming. Any honourable man who was already engaged upon
a continuation would have laid his work aside and left the original
author in possession of the field. Unluckily the idea of continuing
Don Quixote had occurred to an unscrupulous writer. It is no easy
task to be just, in this matter, to Cervantes and to his competitor ; for,
while Cervantes is, so to say, the personal friend of each man amongst
us, his obscure rival has contrived to lose the respect of the whole
world. But it is our duty to attempt it. In the first place, then,
let us bear in mind that Cervantes was often almost as optimistic as
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 11
Don Quixote ; the conception of a book flashed into his brain, and
he looked upon the composition as a mere detail. In this very
prologue which announces the Second Part of Don Quixote, Cervantes
announces two other books : Los Trdbc0os de Persiles y Sigismumda,
which appeared posthumously, and Las Semanas del Jardm, which
never appeared at all. Elsewhere he promises works to be entitled,
El Engano a las ojos and Bernardo, and these never appeared either.
During thirty-one years, on five separate occasions, he promised the
sequel to La Galatea, and that also never appeared. It has been
argued that, in announcing the sequel to Don Quixote, Cervantes is
fairly categorical; he promises it 'shortly' {con brevedad). He
undoubtedly does ; but the words are of evil omen, for he used the
same formula when he first promised the continuation of La Galatea.
In the second place, we cannot infer (as we might in the case of
a punctilious precisian who weighed his words carefully) that the
Second Part of Don Quixote was nearly completed when Cervantes
referred to it in the preface to his Novelas exemplares, which was
licensed on July 2, 1612. Far from it ! He may not have written
even a chapter of it at that date ; he had not written half of it on
July 20, 1614, the memorable day on which the newly fledged
Governor, Sancho Panza, dictated his letter to his wife Teresa. It
foUows that, if Cervantes worked at anything like a uniform rate of
speed, he cannot have begun the sequel till about January, 1614!.
These circumstances, more or less attenuating, should be taken
into consideration before passing sentence on Alonso Fernandez de
Avellaneda, who, in 161 4<, brought out a spurious continuation of
Don Quixote, a clever, coarse performance, which, especially in Le
Sage's expanded version, has often been mistaken — by Pope, for
instance, in the Essay on Criticism — for the authentic sfequel.
Avellaneda had a fair, or at least a plausible, case ; but he com-
pletely ruined it by the ribaldry of his preface, in which he jeers
at Cervantes's misfortunes and alleged defects of character — his
mutilation, his imprisonment, his poverty, his stammer, his jealousy,
his lack of friends. These brutalities wounded Cervantes to the
soul, and led him to conclude the Second Part of Don Quixote in all
haste. Thus, quite unintentionally, the insolent railer probably
saved the book from the fate which befell the sequel to La Galatea,
and the other works already mentioned. Avellaneda deserves our
ironical congratulations : he meant murder, but committed suicide.
Within a year of his intrusion the genuine continuation of Don
Quixote was published, and it amply disproved the truth of Sanson
Carrasco's remark : ' Second Parts are never good.' Goethe and
12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Hallam preferred the First Part, and unquestionably the Second is
but a splendid development of what preceded it. Coleridge draws
a characteristic distinction: 'Who can have courage to attempt
a reversal of the judgement of all criticism against continuations ?
Let us except Don Quixote, however, although the Second Part of
that transcendent work is not exactly uno fiatv, with the original
conception.' The First Part is the more humorous and fantastic,
the Second Part is the more ingenious and artistic ; but nobody has ever
contended that this Second Part was 'not good,' with the single
exception of Lamb, who was betrayed into this freakish outburst :
' Marry, when somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun,
and put him upon writing that unfortunate Second Part, with the
confederacies of that unworthy Duke and most contemptible Duchess,
Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to his understanding.' 'Sacrificed
his instinct to his understanding ! ' It may amount to a confession
of ineptitude, but I confess I am not nearly so sure as I could wish to
be that I catch the precise meaning of this expression, and I prefer not
to take it too seriously. It occurs in a letter addressed to Southey,
and perhaps not even the most judicial of us would care to abide
by every word let fall in the careless freedom of private corre-
spondence. At any rate posterity has not accepted Lamb's emphatic
verdict. Nor did the writer's contemporaries and immediate suc-
cessors find anything but praise for the story of Don Quixote's later
exploits.
Cervantes lived just long enough to witness his triumph, and he
needed all the solace that it could give him. Old and infirm, he was
eclipsed in popular favour by the more dazzling and versatile genius
of Lope de Vega, then in the meridian of his glory. We must
distinguish between fame and popularity. Famous Cervantes was
both in and out of Spain ; he was not, like Lope, the idol of his
countrymen. The greatest of all Spaniards, in life more than in death,
Cervantes's appeal was rather universal than national. He had
survived most of his own generation, lived into a less heroic time,
and, though he was no philosopher or sociologist, perhaps viewed
with some misgivings the new society which had replaced the age
of chivalry.
He look'd on the rushing decay
Of the times which had shelter'd his youth —
Felt the dissolving throes
Of a social order he loved —
Outlived his brethren, his peers ;
And, like the Theban seer.
Died in his enemies' day.
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 13
He died, in fact, on April 23, 1616 — nominally on the same day
as Shakespeare, and we ask for nothing better than to be allowed to
forget the difference between the calendars of Spain and England,
and, adapting Homer, to say that in both countries the sun perished
out of heaven at the same hour.
Before long the Second Part of Don Quivote reached England
in the Brussels edition of 1616. Probably the earliest trace of it
occurs about 1619 in the fifth act of The Double Marriage, where
Fletcher and Massinger introduce a scene between the courtier
Castruccio and the doctor which is unmistakably modelled after
the account in the forty-seventh chapter of Pedro Recio de Agiiero's
attempt to deprive Sancho Panza of his dinner. In 1620 the sequel
to Don Quixote was brought directly before the English public
in Shelton's translation, and in this same year Thomas May, in
the first act of Tfie Heir, after making Clarimont refer to 'the
unjust disdain of the lady Dulcina del Toboso,' describes Amadis de
Gaula and Don Quixote as ' brave men whom neither enchantments,
giants, windmills, nor flocks of sheep, could vanquish.' This, of
course, is from the First Part ; but in 1620 Fletcher inserted one detail
from the Second Part in TTie Pilgrim, and, in 1623, the second act of
Massinger's play TTie Duke of Milan reveals Mariana taunting her
sister-in-law Marcelia with suffering from an issue : a reminiscence of
the scandal about the Duchess confided to Don Quixote's reluctant
ear by Dona Rodriguez in the forty-eighth chapter of the Second
Part.
In the third decade of the seventeenth century writers in search of
a theme sought it oftener in the Novelas exemplares than in Don
Quixote. For instance, in 1621-2 Middleton and Rowley based The
Spanish Gipsie on La Gitanilla and La Fuerza de la Sangre. A more
assiduous follower of Cervantes was Fletcher, who in 1619 derived
The Queen of Corinth from La Fuerza de la Samgre ; in 1621,
collaborating with Massinger, Fletcher based A Very Woman on
El Amante liberal; in 1622 he inserted in The Beggars' Bv^h
some touches from La Gitanilla ; in 1623, perhaps aided once
more by Massinger, he produced Love's Pilgrimage from Las
dos Doncellas; in 1624 El Casamiento enganoso yielded him Rule
a Wife and have a Wife; in 1625-6 he transformed La Ilustre
Fregona into The Fair Maid of the Inn ; in 1628 he went afield
to take The Custom of the Country from Cervantes's posthumous
romance, Los Traibqjos de Persiks y Sigismimda; but he returned
later to the Novelas exemplares and dramatized La Senora Cornelia
as The Chances. A still more convincing proof of English interest
14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
concerning Cervantes's writings is afforded by the fact that Massinger
in 1624 wrote The Renegade in view of the set drama entitled Los
Banos de Jrgel, and The Fatal Dowry in 1632 showed a knowledge
of the entremis entitled El Viejo celoso. It was comparatively easy
for Fletcher to read the Novelas exemplares in the Brussels edition
of 1614 ; but, as the volume of plays issued by Cervantes in 1615
was not reprinted till 1749, it is evident that Massinger must have
taken the trouble to procure a copy of the Madrid princeps—a.
difficult matter at that date.
This fashion ran its course, as you may read in the Master of
Peterhouse's admirable History of English Dramatic Literature ; and,
in due time, English writers went back to Don Quixote. In 1630
Davenant printed The Cruell Brother, borrowing from Cervantes the
name of one personage and the characteristics of another : —
Signior
Lothario ; a Country Gentleman
But now the Court Bahoone, who persuades himselfe
(Out of a new kind of madness) to be
The Duke's favourite. He comes. Th' other is
A bundle of proverbs, whom he seduc'd
From the plough, to serve him for preferment.
In 1635 an allusion to the ' good knight of the ill favor'd Counten-
ance' is used to ornament the third act of The Lady Mother by
Henry Glapthome, a dramatist of no great repute, whose Wit
in a Constable, published four years afterwards, contains Clare's
intimidating question to Sir Timothy Shallowwit : —
Is it you.
Sir Knight of the ill favor'd face.
That would have me for your Dulcinea?
In 1640 appeared James Mabbe's fragmentary version of the
Novelas exemplares which Godwin esteemed as 'perhaps the most
perfect specimen of prose in the English language.' It is enough to
call it admirable. But let me say frankly that I have two grudges
against Mabbe : one because he omits six of the novels, perhaps the
best in the collection : the other because, though he resided in
Madrid from 1611 to 1613 as a member of Digby's mission, he
apparently took no trouble to meet Cervantes and gives us no
information concerning him. Surely this is one of those rare cases
in which all but the most austere of men would welcome a little
'personal' journalism.
' I have almost forgot my Spanish, but after a little may recover
it,' says Riches in Shirley's masque A Contention for Hsmcmr and
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 15
Rkhes, which dates from 1632 ; and perhaps Riches here speaks for
the modest author. However that may be, Shirley knew enough
Spanish to utilize Tirso de Molina in his Opportunity and Lope de
Vega in The Yoimg Admiral; hence it is not surprising that, when
recasting his masque in 1652 under the title oiHonoria and Mammon,
he should introduce the ' forehead of Dulcinea of Toboso ' into the
fifth act. The Doubk Falsehood, based on Cardenio's story and
ascribed by Lewis Theobald to Shakespeare, has been conjecturally
attributed to Shirley ; but this is doubtful. During the Protectorate
the only contribution specially interesting to the student of Cervantes
is the curious, festive commentary by Gayton whose Pleasant Notes
upon Don Quixote are still well worth reading. The Restoration
was barely accomplished when in 1663 Butler launched the first
part of Hudibra^, a witty, pointed, violent lampoon written in imita-
tion of Cervantes, but with blustering humour and rancorous jibes
substituted for the serene grace and bland satire of the master.
In 1671 Aphra Behn's play The Amorous Prince showed how much
that was objectionable could be infused into the story of the Curious
Impertinent, but Aphra Behn was outdone in 1694 and 1696 by
D'Urfey whose Comical History of Don Quixote provoked Collier's
famous Short View of the Immorality amd Profaneness of the English
Stage. It is one of life's ironies that this fulminating protest should
have been called forth by a work professedly derived from Cervantes
who justly prided himself on the morality of his writings.
D'Urfey was left to bear the burden of his sins : Cervantes's vogue
in England continued unchecked. Temple proclaimed Don Quixote
to be, as satire, 'the best and highest strain that ever has been,
or will be, reached by that vein.' Spence tells us that Orford's
inquiry whether Rowe knew Spanish led the latter to study the
language, perhaps in the hope that it might lead to the Embassy at
Madrid. Having mastered Spanish, Rowe announced the fact to
Orford who drily said : ' Then, sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading
Don Quixote in the original.' And no doubt Rowe did read it, suid
hence a line in The Fair Penitent which use has converted into
a tag : —
Is this that haughty gallant, gay Lothario ?
Addison gave a somewhat lukewarm allegiance to Cervantes in
TTis Whig Examiner (No, 3) and in The Guardian (No. 135), as well
as in The Spectator (Nos. 227 and 249), linking Don Quixote with
Hudibras, and talking (not very acutely) of ' mean Persons in the
Accoutrements of Heroes.' Steele did better when he promoted
• the accomplish'd Spaniard ' to be patron of the Set of Sighers
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
in the University of Oxford. In 1719 Arbuthnot unsuccessfnlly.,
attempted to imitate Don Quixote in his short Life and Adventvnres
of Don Bilioso de TEstomac, Some biographers of Swift suggest
that A Tdk of a Tvb is modelled upon Don Quixote ; I see no trace
of direct imitation, and nothing could be further apart than the
Englishman's splenetic gloom and the Spaniard's delicate charm, but
I admit that the unadorned diction and sustained irony of Swifb
recalls one of Cervantes's many manners.
A passage in the Chwracteristicks of the third Earl of Shaftesbury
is worth quoting: — 'Had I been a Spanish Cervantes and, with
success equal to that comick Author, had destroyed the reigning
taste of Gothic or Moorish Chivalry, I could afterwards contentedly
have seen my burlesque itself despised and set aside.' This utterance
is interesting, for it implies that in 1703 Cervantes was still considered
to be essentially a ' comick Author.' But a reference in The Dtmciad
to ' Cervantes's serious air ' shows that Pope had a truer insight into
the significance of a book which, as I have already said, he began by
reading in Le Sage's amplification of Avellaneda. Henceforward,
Cervantes becomes less and less regarded as a purely 'comick Author.'
As far back as 1730 Fielding in the second act of The Coffee-House
Politiciam declared that ' the greatest .part of Mankind labour under
one delirium or another, and Don Quixote differed from the rest,
not in Madness, but the species of it.' Fielding's play Don Quixote
in England dates from 1734 and, poor as it is, it is a tribute to
a great predecessor, a tribute paid more abundantly eight years later
in the History and Adventwres of Joseph Andrews where Parson
Adams appears as an unmistakable descendant of Don Quixote's.
The Female Quixote, an imitation by Charlotte Lennox which was
published in 1752, is praised by Fielding in the Journal of a
Voyage to Lisbon, and was lauded by Samuel Johnson, who thought
that Cervantes's book had no superior but the Iliad. Sterne ranked
Cervantes even above his other favourite, Rabelais, but we should have
guessed this without Sterne's personal assurance, for page after page
of Tristram Shandy is redolent of Don Quixote. Though the title of
The Adventures of Sir Laivtweht Greaves proves that Smollett had the
Spanish book in view, the imitation is wholly unworthy of the model,
and in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker the resemblance which
we are told existed between Lieutenant Lismahago and the Knight
of La Mancha is merely physical. Smollett's imitative fiction is
comparatively a failure but, as I shall show in an instant, he was
a warm admirer of Don Quixote, and did Cervantes good service in
another field. To that field I shall now turn, for The Spiritual
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 17
Quixote of Richard Graves, published in 1773, and similar pro-
ductions of this period have lost whatever interest they may once
have had.
During the eighteenth century there were numerous attempts in
England to promote the serious study of Cervantes's works by means
which cannot fail to interest a learned audience. We have seen that
the earliest translation of the First Pari of Don Quixote was pub-
lished at London in 1612 by Shelton : Shelton's version of both
parts was reprinted in 1731, and was also issued in a revised form
by Captain John Stevens in 1700 and 1706. In 1687, Milton's
nephew, John Philips, had published a miserable travesty of the
original, and in 1700 the French refugee, Peter Motteux, brought
out a readable version, which is based on Shelton's rendering, and
checked by constant comparison with the French translation of
Filleau de Saint-Martin. Motteux' version, which included the
earliest biographical sketch of Cervantes, is still reprinted, less on
accojint of its own merits than because of the excellent preface which
Lockhart wrote for it in 1822. But it was felt that these publica-
tions were unworthy of English scholarship. As Shelton was the
first man to translate Don Quixote, so a London publisher, Jacob
Tonson, was the first to produce a handsome edition of the original,
which put to shame the sorry reprints issued in Spain and elsewhere.
Tonson's edition, published in 1738, was based upon the Brussels re-
impressions of 1607 and 1611, was revised by Pedro de Pineda, and
was preceded by the first formal biography of Cervantes ever issued.
This life was written by the most eminent Spanish scholar of the age,
Gregorio MayAns y Siscar, who received the commission from the
English ex-Secretary of State, Lord Carteret. In 1742 the painter,
Charles Jervas, published a new rendering of Don Quixote, in some
important respects an advance on previous versions. Spence records
Pope's perfidious remark that his friend Jervas 'translated Don
Quixote without understanding Spanish.' The charge is absurd:
Jervas's knowledge of Spanish is beyond cavil. His English style
is thought inadequate by critics, and his rendering is neglected by
his later rivals; but innumerable cheap reproductions prove that
it satisfies a multitude of less exacting readers. Jervas's version
was likewise of great service to Smollett who utilized it extensively
when engaged upon the translation which he issued in 1755 ; and the
preface to this translation is exceptionally interesting, for here Smollett
pointed out, six years before the point had occurred to any Spaniard,
that the prisoner Cervantes, mentioned as a native of AlcaU de Henares
in Diego de Haedo's Topografia e Historia de Argel, must be the
18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
author of Don Quixote. This detail, which was also made public at
about the same time by Colonel Windham, practically settled the
dispute as to Cervantes's birthplace. A far more valuable contri-
bution to students of Cervantes was the first commentary on
Don Quixote ever published : this was issued in 1781 by John Bowie,
vicar of Idmiston, who has done more to elucidate Cervantes's master-
piece than any other commentator, with the possible exception of
Clemencin. Envy and detraction did their worst in Barretti's
venomous Tolondron; but in vain, for all the world over 'Don
Bowie,'' as his friends affectionately called him, is held in honour by
every student of Spanish literature.
With the last century we reach ground familiar to all. It would
be an endless and superfluous task to trace the allusions to
Cervantes's great book in English literature of the nineteenth
century. Byron tells us in Don Juan that Adeline, like Rowe,
studied Spanish
To read Don Quixote in the original,
A pleasure before which all others vanish.
And her example was widely followed. Yet we may take it as certaia
that imperfect translations suggested the characters of Sam Weller,
that Cockney variant of Sancho Panza, and of Colonel Thomas
Newcome. 'They call him Don Quixote in India,' said General
Sir Thomas de Boots, ' I suppose you have read Don Quixote ? ' ' Never
heard of it, upon my word,' replied Barnes Newcome, whose only
contribution to literature was a Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections.
But Hazlitt had heard of Don Quixote, and Southey, Scott, Lockhart,
Macaulay, and FitzGerald knew the original well. Macaulay
esteemed it 'the best novel in the world, beyond all comparison,'
and found it even ' prodigiously superior to what I had imagined,'
while to FitzGerald it became ' the Book.' I believe that it is included
in the Bibliotheque Positiviste, and that Comte placed Cervantes
himself in the Positivist Calendar. We have not yet made Cervantes
our national saint, but no one has written more delightfully of him than
that distinguished Positivist, Mr. Frederic Harrison ; and the gi-eatest
of our romance writers, Mr. George Meredith, celebrates with enthusiasm
Cervantes's 'loftiest moods of humour, fusing the tragic sentiment
with the comic narrative.' The publication of three new and in-
dependent versions by Duffield, Ormsby, and Watts, in 1881, 1885,
and 1888 respectively, is convincing proof of our unabated interest in
Don Quixote. Two large quarto volumes — quorum pars parva fui —
containing the first critical edition of the original appeared at the
CERVANTES IN ENGLAND 19
very end of the nineteenth century, and, if they indicate nothing
else, at least imply a boundless belief in the future of ^the Book'; and
the only satisfactory rendering of the Novelas exemplares, due to
Mr. Norman MacCoU whom death has so recently snatched from us,
figures in a translation of Cervantes's Complete Works which was
begun in the first year of the twentieth century.
This brings my prolix exposition to a close. I have laid before
you a body of facts to justify the assertions with which I began.
I have shown that England was the first foreign country to men-
tion Don Quixote, the first to translate the book, the first country in
Europe to present it decently garbed in its native tongue, the first
to indicate the birthplace of the author, the first to provide a bio-
graphy of him, the first to publish a commentary on Don Quixote,
and the first to issue a critical edition of the text. I have shown that
during three centuries English literature teems with significant allu-
sions to the creations of Cervantes's genius, that the greatest English
novelists are among his disciples, and that English poets, dramatists,
scholars, critics, agreed upon nothing else, are unanimous and fervent
in their admiration of him. ' There is an everlasting undercurrent
of murmur about his name, the deep consent of all great men that
he is greater than they.' That, Lord Reay, is my case : it is for you
and your colleagues in the British Academy to judge if I have
proved it.
,/■■' ;■ ''Qxford .,■• ;;/ -\'--: I
Printed by Horace H&rt, '"it iW pUkttsity Press
Cornell University Library
PQ 6353.F55
Cervantes in Enaland.
3 1924 027 679 962
^s^^^^r
